The Cab of the Sleeping Horse eBook

He gave the necessary order; when the letter was brought
he passed it to Marston.

“I’ll read the copy, if you’ll hold
the original,” he said; and proceeded to call
off the letters with amazing rapidity. “Correct,
isn’t it?” as he ended.

“Yes!” said Marston returning the original
to Carpenter. He wanted in every way to disarm
suspicion; moreover, a copy could be made more readily
from a large typewritten edition than from the small,
written original. “Now for the code-book
and the last key-word—­a l’aube
du jour, I think it is ... yes, a l’aube
du jour, it is,” and he handed the book
across. “Shall we try it first, Mr. Carpenter?”

“By all means,” said Carpenter. “Shall
I set it down, or will you?”

One would never have imagined from his expression
or his intonation that he had already tried a l’aube
du jour for the key-word and failed; nor that
why he had failed he now knew. The book was right
as to the word, and the slip that Harleston had taken
from Crenshaw’s pocket-book confirmed it. A
l’aube du jour was not the key-word but the
key-word was constructed from it by some arbitrary
rule; and that rule was susceptible of solution.
After he was free of this fellow Marston, he would
solve the problem quickly enough. It was as sure
as tomorrow. The prescience was come.

“About twenty letters should be enough for experiment?”
he suggested, taking up a test card.

When he had written the key-word and the letters under
it, he, scarcely without reference to the Blocked-Out
Square, wrote the translation. Marston did the
same, very much slower.

“It doesn’t fit!” Marston announced.
“You can’t make anything out of AGELUMTONZN,
and so forth.”

“I’m disappointed,” Marston confessed,
“I thought sure we had it. Let’s
try the next key-word in the book.”

They tried it, and the next, and all the rest.
None of them translated the letter.

It took more than an hour; at the end, as a full measure
of good faith and because it was of no further use
to him—­he having preserved a copy—­Marston
insisted that Carpenter retain the original of the
French code-book and have a copy made, after which
the book could be returned to him at the Chateau.
During this hour and more his hand was in and out
in his side coat-pocket. When he left the room
there went with him, in that pocket, a copy of the
original letter—­roughly made by the sense
of touch alone, yet none the less a copy and sufficiently
distinct to be decipherable. For years Marston
had practised writing in the dark and under all sorts
of handicaps. In his pocket, a number of small
slips of paper and a pencil were concealed. He
would write a line, then take his hand from his pocket;
after a time he would shift the page of paper, write
another line, and then another, and so on until the
copy was made. And all the while he was so frankly
communicative, with apparently not the slightest intent
to obtaining a copy—­even tearing up the
paper on which were the various trial translations—­that
he completely deceived Carpenter. When he left,
the latter went with him to the elevator and bowed
him down.